In this episode of Private Life, the writer, translator, and editor Gini Alhadeff reads excerpts from Mark Polizzotti’s recent translation, for NYRB Classics, of André Breton’s 1928 surrealist novel, Nadja. Blending autobiography and fiction, this abidingly strange book recounts, analyzes, and remembers Breton’s brief love affair with the eponymous young woman in 1920s Paris.

Alhadeff is the author of a memoir, The Sun at Midday (1997), and a novel, Diary of a Dijinn (2003), and the translator of a number of Italian novels, including I Am the Brother of XX, by Fleur Jaeggy, and The Road to the City, by Natalia Ginzburg.

To find Mark Polizzotti’s translation of Nadja by André Breton and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

In this episode of Private Life, Jarrett Earnest is joined by Mark Polizzotti to discuss André Breton’s surrealist novel, Nadja, originally published in 1928 and translated into English by Polizzotti for NYRB Classics in 2025. Polizzotti gives insight into the process of translation, the facts of the real Nadja’s life, and the quotations and photography that Breton employed to evoke the woman behind the “ethereal phantom.”

André Breton was a French poet, writer, and theorist, best known as a pioneering Surrealist and Dadaist. He published Claire de Terre, a collection of poems, in 1923 and the Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme)in 1924. Breton also cofounded the literary magazine Littérature in 1919.

Mark Polizzotti is a writer based in New York. He has translated over seventy books from the French, including Command Performance (NYRB Classics, 2025) by Jean Echenoz and The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings (NYRB Poets, 2022) by Arthur Rimbaud. Polizzotti is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (1995), Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (2018), and Why Surrealism Matters (2024). He is currently the publisher and editor-in-chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To find Nadja and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

In this episode of Private Life, Richard Hell reads from his novel Godlike (2005), which was reissued last month by NYRB Classics with a new afterword by Raymond Faye. Godlike tells the story of a poet perambulating downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and pining for a young poet who probably won’t love him back, closely mirroring the doomed romance between the nineteenth-century French poètes maudits Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.

Richard Hell is a writer and former musician best known as a pioneer of the punk rock scene in 1970s New York. Some of his books include The Voidoid (1996), Artifact (1990), Hot and Cold (2001), Go Now (1996), I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (2013), and What Just Happened (2023).

This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Hell discussing his novels, poetry, and creative process. To find Richard Hell’s Godlike and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books; in addition to twenty print issues a year, a subscription provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

In this episode of Private Life, Richard Hell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his novel Godlike (newly reissued by NYRB Classics), his creative process, the love of poetry, and the stories behind his work.

Richard Hell is a writer and former musician best known as a pioneer of the punk rock scene in 1970s New York. Originally from Kentucky, he moved to New York at the age of seventeen and began publishing his poetry. In his early twenties, along with his friend Tom Verlaine, he started the Neon Boys, which later became the influential punk rock band Television. He went on to form the bands the Heartbreakers and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. In addition to Godlike, Hell has written several novels, poetry collections, and essay collections, as well as a memoir, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (2013). Godlike, which was reissued last month by NYRB Classics with a new afterword by Raymond Foye, was originally published in 2005. Crossing Hell’s experiences in the demimonde of 1970s New York City with the doomed romance of the nineteenth-century poètes maudits of France, it traverses the profane and the profound in the story of a poet perambulating downtown Manhattan and pining for a young poet who probably won’t love him back.

To find Richard Hell’s Godlike and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

In the June 24, 1999, issue of The New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates wrote about the murder of JonBenét Ramsey and dissected America’s fascination with “the category of nonfiction known as ‘true crime.’” In this episode of Private Life, “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey" is read by writer Alissa Bennett, whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, Vogue, The New York Times, and Artforum. From 2016 to 2019 she also wrote the zine Dead Is Better, about celebrity deaths, and from 2019 to 2022 she cohosted the podcast The C-Word with Lena Dunham.

This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Oates discussing her novels, essays, and the improbability of her life. You can read “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey” with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

In the third episode of Private Life, Joyce Carol Oates joins Jarrett Earnest for an expansive conversation on everything from Joan Didion to serial killers. They discuss “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” Didion’s essay from the Review’s March 7, 1991, issue about the Central Park Five, the rush to judgment in a sensational murder case, media mythmaking, and sentimentalized narratives about crime. The conversation also touches on the state of long-form criticism, true crime’s grip on pop culture, and the elusive art of the novella, and Oates reflects on her writing (including three essays about murderers that she wrote for the Review: “‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness,’” “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey,” and “Death in the Air”) and the improbability of her life.

Joyce Carol Oates’s many novels, essays, short stories, poems, and works of criticism have addressed subjects ranging from boxing to Marilyn Monroe, often exploring the dark underbelly of American life. She is a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Rutgers–New Brunswick and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Harper’s, among many other publications. She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1992, when she wrote “The Cruelest Sport,” about boxing, Muhammad Ali, and masculinity. Her most recent novel, Fox, about a predatory English teacher at a New Jersey boarding school, came out last year. Read the essays discussed in this episode with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.

Read the essays discussed in this episode:

New York: Sentimental Journeys

I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness

The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey

Death in the Air

The Cruelest Sport

In the May 4, 1972, issue of The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about the lives and work of the Brontë sisters on the occasion of Winifred Gérin’s then-new biography of Emily (preceded by Gérin’s biographies of Anne, Branwell, and Charlotte, and followed in 1973 by her group biography The Brontës). In this episode of Private Life, Hardwick’s essay is read by Kathleen Chalfant, an actress who has appeared in television, in film, and in stage productions on and off Broadway. She is currently performing in New York in the Playwrights Horizons production of Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs, and she recently starred in Sarah Friedland’s film Familiar Touch (2024).

This reading serves as an accompaniment to the Private Life episode featuring Darryl Pinckney discussing his close friendship with Hardwick. You can also read “Working Girls: The Brontës” with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.